Times Higher Young Academic Author of the Year

Todman: tracked war in popular culture

16 November 2006

Winner: Dr Dan Todman, Queen Mary, University of London

Dr Dan Todman, author of The Great War: Myth and Memory, impressed The Times Higher’s judges with his expert juggling of ‘an enormous body’ of sources.

He delves into literature, films, war comics and television programmes to present his compelling argument about how attitudes towards the First World War have changed.

Today, it may seem a cut-and-dried case: the war was a national disaster, ill-managed and horrifyingly futile. But Todman illustrates that such a view is anachronistic. At the time, he argues, generals were trusted and the public were more interested in patriotic poetry than in the pity of war.

Jon Turney, former commissioning editor at Penguin Press and convener of the MSc in creative non-fiction writing at Imperial College London, said: “He handled all these sources without ever losing control of the material. He latches on to things people remember, form Blackadder to the Pat Barker trilogy of novels. It was a very readable book.”

Turney added: “Along the way, he rather subtly and nicely changes one’s opinion of the whole trajectory of the war – which is, of course, what he set out to do.”

Todman’s PhD at Cambridge University, on representations of the First World War in British popular culture, clearly paved the way for the book which he started immediately after his thesis.

His first teaching job was in the war studies department of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He joined Queen Mary, University of London, in 2003. He lectures on the shaping of contemporary Britain, the First and Second World Wars and the cultural legacy of conflict.

Todman is now working on a general history of the Second World War, which he hopes will interest and excite the public as much as the academic community, just as his first work has.

Dr Todman said: “I was genuinely surprised to win in a really competitive field
which contained so many excellent books. I'm very grateful to Queen Mary’s Department of History for the support and faith it has shown in me.”

Notes to Editors:

Queen Mary, University of London

Queen Mary, University of London is one of the UK's leading research-focused higher education institutions with some 15,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Amongst the largest of the colleges of the University of London, Queen Mary’s 3,000 staff deliver world class degree programmes and research across 21 academic departments and institutes, within three sectors: Science and Engineering; Humanities, Social Sciences and Laws; and the School of Medicine and Dentistry.

Queen Mary is ranked 11th in the UK according to the Guardian analysis of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, and has been described as ‘the biggest star among the research-intensive institutions’ by the Times Higher Education.

The College has a strong international reputation, with around 20 per cent of students coming from over 100 countries.

Queen Mary has an annual turnover of £220 million, research income worth £61 million, and generates employment and output worth £600 million to the UK economy each year.

Queen Mary, as a member of the 1994 Group of research-focused universities, has made a strategic commitment to the highest quality of research, but also to the best possible educational, cultural and social experience for its students. The College is unique amongst London's universities in being able to offer a completely integrated residential campus, with a 2,000-bed award-winning Student Village on its Mile End campus.

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